Transcript

2.
About This Release
• Xen Project 4.4.0 was released on March 10,
2014.
• This release is the work of 8 months of
development, with 1193 changesets.
• Xen Project 4.4 is our first release made with
an attempt at a 6-month development cycle.
– Between Christmas, and a few important blockers,
we missed that by about 6 weeks; but still not too
bad overall.

13.
• PVH mode combines the best elements of
HVM and PV
– PVH takes advantage of many of the
hardware virtualization features that exist
in contemporary hardware
• Potential for significantly increased
efficiency and performance
• Reduced implementation footprint in
Linux,FreeBSD
• Enable with "pvh=1" in your config
Experimental PVH Guest Support

18.
Mirage OS
• In the next-gen cloud, small and modular is
key
– Some claim that Containers (e.g., Docker) are
the future; hypervisors are dead
– But Cloud Operating Systems (aka Library
Operating Systems, Unikernels, etc.) can
create tiny VMs with all the security of
hypervisors while reducing the VM attack
surface

19.
Mirage OS (2)
• Xen Project continues to lead the way in Cloud
Operating Systems
– Mirage OS V2.0 released in July 2014
– Creates lightweight VM appliances, many 1 MB or
less in size
– Openmirage.org is self-hosted Mirage-based
application
– Opens the door to 1000's of VMs per host
– Plus, we support many other Cloud OS's as well

22.
• Linux driver domains used to rely on udev
events in order to launch backends for
guests
– Dependency on udev is replaced with a custom
daemon built on top of libxl
– Now feature complete and consistent between Linux
and non-Linux guests
– Provides greater flexibility in order to run user-space
backends inside of driver domains
– Example of capability: driver domains can now use
Qdisk backends, which was not possible with udev
Improved Disk Driver Domains

23.
• SPICE is a protocol for virtual desktops
which allows a much richer connection
than display-only protocols like VNC
• Added support for additional SPICE
functionality, including:
– Vdagent
– clipboard sharing
– USB redirection
Improved Support for SPICE

25.
• Modern storage devices work much better
with larger chunks of data
• Indirect descriptors have allowed the size
of each individual request to triple,
greatly improving I/O performance when
running on fast storage technologies like
SSD and RAID
• This support is available in any guest
running Linux 3.11 or higher (regardless
of Xen Project version)
Indirect Descriptors for Block PV Protocol

26.
• kexec allows a running Xen Project host to be
replaced with another OS without rebooting
– Primarily used execute a crash environment to
collect information on a Xen Project hypervisor or
dom0 crash
• The existing functionality has been extended
to:
– Allow tools to load images without requiring dom0
kernel support (which does not exist in upstream
kernels)
– Improve reliability when used from a 32-bit dom0
– kexec-tools 2.0.5 or later is required
Improved kexec Support

27.
• XAPI and Mirage OS are sub-projects within the
Xen Project written in OCaml
• Both are also used in XenServer and rely on the
Xen Project OCaml language bindings to
operate well
• These language bindings have had a major
overhaul
– Produces much better compatibility between XAPI,
Mirage OS and Linux distributions going forward
Improved XAPI and Mirage OS support

29.
• EFI is the new booting standard that is
replacing BIOS
– Some operating systems only boot with EFI
– Some features, like SecureBoot, only work
with EFI
Experimental Support for Guest EFI boot

30.
• You can find a blog post to set up an iSCSI
target on the Gluster blog:
– http://www.gluster.org/2013/11/a-gluster-block-
interface-performance-and-configuration/
Improved Integration With GlusterFS

31.
• A number of new features have been implemented:
• 64 bit Xen Project on ARM now supports booting
guests
• Physical disk partitions and LVM volumes can now
be used to store guest images using xen-blkback
(that is, using PV drivers)
• Significant stability improvements across the board
• ARM/multiboot booting protocol design and
implementation
• PSCI support
Improved ARM Support

32.
• Some DMA in Dom0 even with no
hardware IOMMUs
• ARM and ARM64 ABIs are declared stable
and maintained for backwards
compatibility
• Significant usability improvements, such
as automatic creation of guest device
trees and improved handling of host DTBs
Improved ARM Support (2)

34.
• The hypervisor can update the microcode in the
early phase of boot time
– The microcode binary blob can be either as a
standalone multiboot payload, or part of the initial
kernel (dom0) initial ramdisk (initrd)
– To take advantage of this use latest version
of dracut with --early-microcode parameter and on
the Xen Project command line specify: ucode=scan.
– For details see dracut manpage and http://
xenbits.xenproject.org/docs/unstable/misc/xen-comm
and-line.html
Early Microcode Loading

38.
Want to Know More?
• Then come to Xen Project User Summit in
New York City on Sept 15!
• One day of great Xen Project talks
– Unikernels, security, high availability
– SUSE Cloud, OpenStack, CentOS, OSv, HaLVM
– LinuxCon 25% Discount Code: Xenuser25
• Even if you are just investigating virtualization
alternatives, we'd like you to join us!